If you know some Chopin and you were driving down
the road in your car, and you switched on a station after they had announced
this album, you might think you were listening to straight-up Chopin
Nocturnes at first. Then you might hear a bit of blues sprinkled in so
artfully you would think it belonged. Matter of fact, you might have a Chopin
"Goldie Oldie," like his NocturneNo. 2 in E-flat major (Op. 9,
No. 2), get by you until you thought of it a little. Hmm, let's see, a bit of
modern harmonics, a soulful bit of jazz phrasing, some syncopation, a few extra
added notes that are definitely not in the score. And, if you're like me, you'd
notice at long last that the pianist was taking considerable liberties with
Chopin, "Impressions" as he says in the title. And then you'd have a decision to
make.

Are you one of those guys who thinks Bach is
sacrosanct, or do you like Bach's various inventions played on a synthesizer? Do
you think it is "criminal" for Duke Ellington to have arranged Tchaikovsky's
The Nutcracker Suite for his jazz orchestra? Or do you find all those
experiments welcome, under the dictum that "music is music," and if Bach or
Tchaikovsky were alive today they'd be interested in hearing what those other
guys could do with their music. I confess I fall into the second of those camps.
I'm not sure but that die-hard jazz fans wouldn't complain on the grounds that a
good jazz musician has to "make up" his own tunes. To which I'd answer, "Then
why do so many jazz immortals do their takes on show-tunes and standards?" I
think Dave Brubeck and John Lewis used to drop some Bach into their solos back
in the 1950s, and Danilu Perez did the same in the ‘90s. So it is not unheard
of. And Jacques Loussier made a career out of playing Bach arranged for jazz
trio. His unofficial "Bach's greatest hits" album is also available on Telarc
SACD-63590.

This album of Chopin's Nocturnes is a more
courageous album, leaving Loussier unprotected and exposed. Here we get to view
his taste, his technique, and his musicianship unencumbered by his trio's input.
It is totally nude Jacques, alone and personally responsible for discarding the
usual left hand figures of the nocturne. This is another of those Telarc albums
that makes me want to take my hat off to all the Dudes involved, especially Bob
Woods, the executive producer. This is a perfect cross-over album. It is the
type of project that will be of interest to the jazz musician with an ear for
the classics, or vice versa. It doesn't sound like a white
musician trying to sound black. Rather, it sounds like a musician, and there are
many (Andre Previn, Bobby McFerrin for but two), who have classical training but
are at home with jazz, and can get their jazz to swing.

Loussier, who's also offered his impressions of
Ravel and Satie, is at home in this dreamy night-music. His light sense of
dynamics, his limpid and beautiful right hand, transform the notes first into
pearls, then into the play of light on a reflecting pond. He has the French
Impressionist sensibility in his bones, particularly his hands. According to
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Chopin took "the name ‘nocturne'
from John Field, [but] he transformed the form, as he did everything, by
harmonic imagination and melodic distinction ... The Victorian conception of
Chopin as a consumptive drawing room balladeer of the keyboard, a conception
connived at by lesser pianists, has long been exposed as a false trail leading
hearers away from the true, poetic, heroic Chopin." Chopin seems a composer
worthy of Loussier's "impressions." You'll dig it.

This article also appears in the current issue
of Audiophile Audition.